Jellybooks Introduce ePub Reader Analytics

The buzz is currently is about big data, or collecting very granular consumer and transactional information and then being able to analyse it. The results may help spot trends, aid development, identify detail which was impossible to compute, or even recognise using traditional methods. As we gather more and more data, the trick is to exploit it in a ways that improve the product, enhance the consumer experience and increases revenues or profitability.

It sounds simple, but it isn’t.

The first challenge is to collect the data, the second is to be able to analyse what you probably don’t know, but assume you do, the third is to develop the results such that they make a return. Many companies have laboured over toolkits such as Google Analytics. Many have seen the money going out the door but not necessarily seen the return coming back in. Today it often seems that everyone and anyone who can spell IT and marketing are offering ways to analyse this, raise that and increase everything.

Now Jellybooks claim to have cracked the analytics for ebooks on 3^rd party apps with their new Reader Analytics, which allows book publishers to analyse how their customers read books across third party reading apps and devices. Jellybooks will be giving a sneak preview at Digital Book World next week, aimed at the publisher and utilises either their own invited focus groups and or Jellybooks’ own subscribers to analyse know users’ reading habits.

Andrew Rhomberg, founder of Jellybooks describes the Reader Analytics as, ‘An ePub analytics tool for the smartphone, tablet, eReader generation that works offline and with 3rd party apps and aims to understand how consumers interact with ebooks that they buy through Kindle, iBooks, Kobo and the like.’ It effectively records the reader’s progress against a title, identifying when each new chapter is opened, the reader’s reading speed, the length of the reading sessions, the time of day when the title was read and when the book was abandoned or finished.

However, this sort of analysis and level of information has long been available to some publishers. Whilst services providing online digital libraries, inspection copies attached to ecatalogues or synchronised walled garden environments have tracked every click. With the inspection copy they know not only what was inspected and shared with others, but importantly whether the copy was even opened.

So what is different with the Jellybook offer?

In accepting a free book and enrolling in a focus group, participating readers agree for their personal reading data to be analysed. There is both a potential strength and also a potential weakness. Firstly, like the consumers that agree to be on TV monitoring panels, it captures real users but in doing so we analyse the known, not the unknown. People who read books today are likely to read the book and will continue to read other books tomorrow. Those who are part time, or no time readers, will remain unhooked. Maybe the offer of a free ebook could entice new readers but will their habits be the same when they have to pay for the book?

Rhomberg also notes that, ‘A truly unbiased tool is only possible with an approach that forces cookies and tracking software on users without their consent. That is neither legal, not morally justifiable in our view.’

Some Marketeers will claim that focus groups often exist to reaffirm their presumptions and often don’t serve an independent perspective. Others believe that they are vital market testers. The problem is that it’s all too often, six of one and half a dozen of the other.

The Jellybook book community which claims some 60,000 avid and passionate readers clearly offers more scope and can generate its own reading groups.

But again does it pass the ‘is it wise dotcom test’?

Trade books, which are going to be the majority of those within the scheme, tend to be one off works so offer marginal editorial improvement unless they are pre-press galley copies. However, simply adding more ‘editors’ to the mix surely could potentially dilute not enhance the work. On the other hand, the potential marketing input on the positioning the work could be of benefit, but only if there is suitable elasticity in the marketing budget to respond.

There is the question of the exposure of the pool of pre-press books available and whether there is risk associated with opening this up to the Jellybook community to potentially see all new books on offer and how this would be policed such that these are all genuine independent readers and not potential competitors? It may matter little today but tomorrow will they potential have input to affect the final cut and if not why are they there?

After publication the benefits in fictional work start to diminish as sales and money will speak louder and further titles within a series will be either contracted or down to performance to date.

So forgetting the technology and functionality, is the Reader Analytics to become a pre-press testing market tool, or a post publication one? Is it technology looking for a home or a business need applying technology to resolve it? Rhomberg says, ‘We put so much emphasis on it being a pre-publication tool, precisely, because we think it has the most value and can lead to actionable results at this stage. In today’s industry the demand after publication is much, much more limited.’

We remember when we provided a major academic publisher with a potentially huge data bank on every click made by every student and academic. This was across a significant digital library at both work and chapter level, as well as the same information against digital inspection copies. Needless to say they were interested in who didn’t open an inspection copy, but where less interested in discovering the digital needle in the haystack. Perhaps times have changed and one would expect and hope so within that market and some others too, but we feel trade fiction is different. 

We wish Jellybooks well with their new service and it will be interesting to see how it develops and is adopted. 

Here are more detail on the Jellybooks tool for authors, publishers and how to sign up.

Why We Need To Challenge Today's eBooks

Offered below are just three arguments that force us to question what we publish today and what we should publish tomorrow. Individually, the arguments may not pass the ‘so what?’ test, but taken together they should ring alarm bells in every publishing building.

Firstly, we often assume we will see and understand change and importantly be prepared for it. The reality is very different and change today is not linear, nor is it predictable and in many cases it is disruptive. The industrial giants of yesterday have been overtaken by technology and networking companies who connect stuff. Things that were once impossible to imagine can now be achieved from anywhere, at any time, in a click. Technology is enabling us to reevaluate how we develop, manage and market content and its associated context. As change happens society adopts and adapts and expectations and values we took for granted also change. Technology is now enabling everyone to be a creator of content and to connect to an audience and this democratisation of creativity is further impacting content formats such as books, film, TV, music, games, photography, art.

Secondly, we are a society, which in the main, has an ownership culture. We buy bricks and mortar and called it home, we  then set about filling it with possessions, some transient and throw away and others more assets and collectibles. Our possessions often reflect and describe who we are, or who we aspire to be. Unlike yesterday many rooms may not be filled with shelves of books, music, films, magazines etc. On demand instant access to very large ’libraries’ starts to question the basics need for ownership and opens the market to models such as rental and subscription, which were not attractive in the old analogue world. Netflix, Lovefilm, Prime, Spotify, Pandora are all creating the on demand market in film and music and now the likes of Oyster, Scribd, Amazon and others are following their lead in the ebook market.  

 

Thirdly, the way we read, what we read and when we read and how we spend our leisure time today is increasingly different from 100 years ago, fifty years ago and even 20 years ago, yet the content itself has altered very little. The vast majority of ebooks today take the content developed for the physical container and merely pour it into a digital one. Is that logical? Are we presuming that’s what consumers want? Imagine we could take the text and create a perfect audiobook at a click, would we really expect that to be good enough or just a lazy quick fix. Today audiobooks are adapted from books and professionally read to fit the medium and consumers’ expectations. It’s true that they no longer are restricted by the digital media but just how long would it take to listen to ‘War and Peace’ with a synthesised voice? Screenplays of books adapt the content to fit the format, consumers’ expectations and budget. We do not have many 5 hour films and most fit within 180 to 240 minutes and may only cover a fraction of the book content. We don’t have many 15 minute music tracks and again these are no longer restricted by the media. 

So why are ebooks so wedded to the 75,000 word or 256 page economic physical book model?

How we should respond to these arguments today and what will we have to consider tomorrow?

We have been fixated on the end form, the finished book and not the creative process itself which for many has changed very little. We have remained locked to the physical book economics and presumed that the chicken will always lay the ebook egg. We have continued to be obsessed with units sold and largely ignored other models which may cause contract friction. We have continued to pour the same content into a similar digital container without thinking. We continue to view the book as the start and not the book as a potential subsidiary. We have many very well subscribed short story competitions which go nowhere. We have failed to grasp or translate the Japanese Keitai opportunity.

There is no silver bullet. No one solution way forward. Expecting that worked yesterday will continue to work tomorrow, is not good enough.

Amazon Matchbox: Wet Matches or Real Fire?

If you buy a print book and get an ebook thrown in you would call it a bundle. It’s like the old ‘buy 1 get 1 free’ offer. You may pay a little extra at the time you buy it, but you may want to read the hardcopy at home and the digital in the version on the train. You may just be a hoarder and intent on owning everything, in every media.

But is physical and digital book bundling mere hype dreamt up by the digital advisors, or a new marketing ‘must have’ and is there a real consumer demand that needs to be fulfilled, or are we merely striking matches in the dark?

Well Amazon have once again gone where others often teeter and have announced Amazon Matchbox. Perhaps it will set the market on fire, or perhaps it will just be another potential attractive offer that keeps the others playing catch-up.

Matchbox offers to let you have a digital copy of those books you bought from Amazon since it started in 1995. Some will cost up to 2.99 others may be free. Once the publisher enrolls and the title is in the programme consumers can complete the bundle. HarperCollins are reported to be the first in Matchbox and Amazon claim some 10,000 titles are already eligible.

If we forget all the big names and titles that litter the press release, we have to ask ourselves whether this is feeding a latent consumer demand, creating a ‘must have’ bundled environment, or just a Matchbox with wet matches?

It is relatively easy to understand those that would subscribe to a MP3 and vinyl bundle, but has this been such a huge success that we all have to have a musical bundle? Books don’t get reread like music can be replayed, or suffer the reduced quality issues of MP3, so why would you buy a book bundle?

Perhaps the answer is in the second hand market of used books, which Amazon just happens to also sell. Perhaps it is to further differentiate Amazon from the pack who don’t sell physical books and probably ever will? Perhaps Amazon know something we don’t?

So you can now sell your old copy if it was bought from Amazon and buy a new digital one which takes up no space, but is yours barring any DRM issues. You can even replace those books you threw out, or previously gave away, or sold. But the point is you could do these things anyway and didn’t need matchbox to achieve it. Matchbox today is retrospective bundling and involves effectively two separate transactions and it will be interesting to see how HRMC in the UK and other tax authorities judge the ‘bundle’ when a tax variation exists between the physical and digital formats.

We presume the offer is purely for the Amazon fulfilled product and doesn’t extend to their other booksellers, ABE and The Book Depository.

Retrospective bundling also introduces issues if the rights have reverted, changed hands or are not world-wide. The question of how these ‘net receipts’ will be accounted and itemised to authors is yet another potential digital ‘honesty box.’

So we are no better off understanding this new ‘bundle’ than we were when we started and Amazon’s intentions may appear to offer even more perceived added value to keep the distance between them and the pretenders.

To visitthe Amazon Matchbox pages

To readAmazon’s press release

Rethinking Marketing and Discoverability for Today

‘Digital publishing is publishing’ and the news this week from Bowker that online sales have reached 44% of total sales should not come as a shock to anyone. The question is what are we doing to exploit this, the rise in digital titles and sales and other cultural changes? We hear lots of talk about who is the retailer, publishers going direct and of course digital, but how are we planning up to service this? Finding and valuing anything on an every increasing virtual shelf is becoming harder, when in fact it should be easier?

Search and discovery in a digital era is very different to that we experienced in the physical only world and yet many appear to be trying to serve up the same basic information and to be crossing their fingers that one shoe will fit all – it won’t. Look at music and how services such as Shazam, Spotify, YouTube, digital online radio and social networks are redefining how we find, sample and enjoy music. 

The Onix XML standard was a milestone for common description of metadata and its construct and promotion was long overdue, but although it was built on some great work done in the music industry by the likes of Muze, it was built primarily on the back of the EDI market and XML standards which were aimed at a physical product market and servicing established B2B supply chain channels. As with many industry standards some would suggest that it often played to the lowest common denominator and rather than expanding the vision and usage of contextual material it confined it to the established B2B service model. It continues to service the online retailers but does it do enough or just enough? Does it really work in a world of self-service where the consumer wants to define their own discovery approach? Does it work when the content is digital and itself can become the metadata to describe itself?

We would suggest three observations towards a different way to view Context and in doing so service Content better.

   

Book in hand

Years ago the major wholesalers created their ‘book in hand’ processes which captured and validated the information about the book as the first copies were handled in the warehouse. The key to this was the fact that the book itself was the best authoritative source of the information. They still needed basic information on which to pre order the title prior to publication, but as many know, the title, jacket and other detail was often subject to change.

We have seen various ‘search inside’, or online samples of the book which are in the main driven by the distributor/wholesalers and online retailers. With the exception of certain sectors it was driven at the discretion of the publisher by the retailer and digital distributors.

Search Inside could be the new book in hand environment, which now can not only service the intermediary, but can also now service the consumer. All that is required is a digital file – the digital rendition itself, the rest is down to technology. So we all can have a book in hand and this can change how we create, develop, control, market, promote and offers a new and different context opportunity.

Contextual rights may be a term we have just created and some would say they already exist today as rights, but it makes sense to recognise them. The could create a leveller playing field and rules in which both intermediaries and consumers are able to fully exploit the digital content for digital content purposes within a standard framework.

When the likes of Amazon started to scan jackets some would have suggested it wasn’t strictly allowed but years later who would suggest that today? Using the full content to provide authority and context is plain logical. A better framework could enhance the discoverability of works and help remove those embarrassing search inside and often meaningless ‘surprise me’ and blank pages.

Far too often we have retained the physical book process and merely tipped the end product into a digital container. This approach was sensible yesterday but could be viewed as very naïve tomorrow.

Word of Mouth

Goodreads and others have demonstrated that many wish to read what others recommend.

The word of mouth recommendation has prevailed throughout history. However with the emergence of social networking it has exploded and we now can see where our ‘friends’ are, what they are reading right now and their views on it and recommendations. It’s like being given the keys to not only their lifestyle, movement but also their library. The challenge isn’t the people we actually know but those who are merely ‘friends by some association’.

Many have long treated the ‘independent review’ with some scepticism. After all, when the reviewer is actually also offering the book for sale, it makes one question how independent they are. Newspapers today sell the books they review and the question must be as to which the driver is and whether the reviews are the reviews independent or mere adverts. We once did a business survey on Home Depot and loved those wiring boards that looked like they were created by the local electrician, but discovered that they were in fact giant POS boards produced centrally. We also loved those little hand written book recommendation cards in some chains, but the sceptic questioned whether these were paid for space, or genuine. We would have loved to see if the same books got the same reviews, or were reviewed in other stores of the same chain. We are also all aware of the numerous claims over false reviews made by interested parties on online service.

Reviews and recommendations are often only as good as the last one and you still need to validate that it is what you actually want.

Looking at the same house through different windows

Today it can be difficult to determine who needs what information and we still build system silos to service only one aspect of the business. Search and discovery has gone beyond the basic bibliographic and metadata information that serviced the B2B market. The market now needs more information in order to sell both physical and digital into the channels and to the consumer.

The virtual bookshelf has given us the challenge of finding needles in digital haystacks.

Digital content can be viewed many ways by many different people. The reader may wish to see the first chapter of a novel. The academic the index and table of contents of a monograph. The teacher or student a selection of pages. Even the bookstore, school or library may wish to see what they are buying. It is just marketing material that can be easily drawn from the same digital content. It’s like looking at a house through different windows and seeing different aspects of the same house.

This leads us onto the catalogue which is just a collection of works which have been compiled together for presentation or commercial offer. There is no difference to the concept of sampling and marketing merely an extension. The reward for thinking this way is that you can see what everyone looks at, or ignores, or even if it have been viewed at all! It can itself drive sales, adoptions and marketing and promotional programmes.

This starts to again beg the question as to whether the same material can serve both B2B and B2C?

It also starts to suggest that the content itself can become the richest source of context to help the marketing and promotion of works and the search and discovery of them not just post publication but across the total lifecycle.

Bezos Enters Newsprint World

Jeff Bezos has thrown down the gauntlet to the newsprint world and is acquiring the Washington Post for $250million.

The questions as to why and what he intends to do with the newspaper are speculation today but the news itself is a significant step to expand Amazon’s reach to all and potentially change the way newsprint operates.

Does this mean Bezos intends to be the new Murdoch and build a media empire? Probably but we would suggest that unlike Murdoch he will not need to buy up the individual presses but merely exploit and expand the one he now has and build a brand that is local, international and importantly individual and this could also involve classifieds and further complimentary purchases.

Forget the rhetoric that will prevail over the next few days, the move is a significant one when you view it alongside his portfolio of offers and his ability to effectively cross subsidise services and offer bundles of books, films, audio, music, technology, marketplace, community and delivery services etc on a truly global manner. Amazon was built on a global brand, vision and offer and that is what differentiated them from many pretenders in many of their propositions.

It is easy to envisage Amazon Singles now expanding in a logical and different direction and this was evident with their latest news piece last week. Their ability to customise the news alongside your tastes and interests in other things, your location and serve them up over Whispernet and their cloud services is formidable and not one that others will easily replicate. However the interesting thing is that Bezos steps in and buys the basics unlike his main competitors who merely offer a marketplace to all. It is this commitment to get involved in the core business that truly differentiates him from the others.

It is going to be an interesting time for newsprint, journalists and classifieds and one where many will now have to look over their shoulders and watch change as it happens.

The story from the Washington Post

image David McNew/Getty Images

Are eBooks An Advert Free Zone?

Yahoo has filed two US patent applications which are based on delivering adverts to ebooks and even offering a variable price that is dependent on the advert placement. Some will cry, ‘not on my watch and it will never happen,’ but perhaps we need to at least consider the implications further before we dismiss it.

If we step back to the Victorian and Edwardian times, the book was often full of adverts for goods which had no connection to the genre or story. The Pamphleteers of the Victorian age also included many adverts in the ‘Penny Dreadful’ and periodicals. Dicken’s own Pickwick Papers included many adverts that told their own story about the culture, products and trades of the day.

Today the only adverts we see in books are those for other titles by the same other, publisher, or in the series. But as the digital book market approaches respectable figures, will that now change, or will tomorrow’s eBooks always remain advert free? Is the Yahoo move an indication of things to come, or merely a patent filing for the shelf and just in case?

Google first gave us Ad Words and Search Engine Optimisation and we appeared suddenly to discover the holy grail. Companies placed their bets and got suckered into a spiral of marketing investment, which may have given a return when you were top of the list, but you had to pay ‘blind man’s buff’ to get there. Technology has long been able to crunch information and drive targeted marketing from the results. Major retailers and especially supermarkets have become experts at analysing not only what we did buy, but also what we didn’t buy that we should have and even what aisles we didn’t buy from. Some thirty years ago US supermarket Vons were one of the leaders in the coupon driven market of the time.

Technology enables us now to be able to target advertising to; recent purchases or items viewed, demographic groups and profiles, searches, key words within text, even changes within our local weather or breaking local news. The key change is that the analysis and results can be now be generated almost instantly and the same advertisement offer can be dynamically tailored to fit the individual.   

The questions we have to ask are about who owns the customer relationship, the advertising contract, revenues and the information? Amazon and Kobo already offer full-screen adverts when the device is switched off and smaller ones on their menu screens. So who drives the advertising dollar? Would the advertising be driven by the retailer, the publisher, or a technology or service provider?

If advertising were seriously introduced into books, it would potentially work with ebooks, but pbooks would remain largely as they are today. So how would, adverts in ebooks be sold to the reader? Would the revenues generated reduce the cost of the ebook as suggested by Yahoo, or will they cross subsidise the tile irrespective of form? Would the revenues count into the royalties net revenues, or be lost outside of the ‘sales’?

We should also recognise moral rights but who would be able to exert them and would they be universally recognised?

In offering that the advertising will pay more and the reader given a greater discount based on how distracting, or intrusive their adverts are to the reader, Yahoo raise an interesting concept. They also suggest that readers could be offered adverts as hyperlinks within the book's text, in-laid text or even "dynamic content" such as video. They suggest the sponsored book, which could be brought to you by Company X and in that we must remember the industry’s acceptance of the MacDonald deal with WHS that we wrote about a few months ago. They also touch on the sensitive aspect of offering sponsored rewards our gifts in children's books.

Books have been a relatively advertising free zone for many decades, but is this has been more driven by the restrictions and economics of the pbook. In the past it was only possible to economically provide mass market driven adverts, but is that now changing with the ebook and internet? We expect to see adverts in papers, magazines and on web pages, so is it acceptable to see them closely aligned to books? With magazines and newsprint the advertiser can reference circulation listings and know roughly who the audience is and how big it is. With TV and film again the audience is well defined but with books some would suggest we enter the world of the unknown.

So do we expect to see ebook adverts soon?

Finding Digital Needles In Digital Haystacks

Remember those dark days before ONIX standards, search inside the jacket, or even picture of the jacket?

Contextual data , or as it in know, Metadata, is produced to help consumers find the book, validate it and also to promote it. When the physical bookshelf was the only option, then we relied heavily on the touchie, feely approach and the promotional sell was to the bookshop. After all,'if it isn’t on the shelf you can’t sell it' and bookstores often have finite shelf space at all levels. Then came the internet and it wasn’t so much about getting it on the shelf, but making it visible amongst the hundreds of thousand others. The onus shifted from supplying the retailer with basic information to supplying the consumer with rich information.  Now we are entering a new phase where the book starts to promote itself and it only the consumer that counts.

The new industry metadata standard (ONIX), has helped define the basic metadata and also its adoption across the supply chain. It served the intermediary world well , but is it enough in a consumer only world where titles are effectively on consignment and don’t have to be sold to the retailer? 

Many will argue that standards and agreed data structures are a must and without them books will just be lost in the new virtual space. Others will counter saying that they all too often act as a straight jacket and are still supply chain focused and not consumer orientated. Somewhere in between lies the reality, the challenge and the opportunity.

One of the greatest constraints the standards give us is on genre classification. We appear to have created the standard ‘tree, branch, twig’ hierarchical approach to genre classification. This was great when you had one book and only had one slot in a bookstore to display it, but is it really as relevant in a virtual bookstore with infinite shelf space where the book can sit in literally thousands of relevant slots? Is it relevant when digital content itself can define in which genres it belongs? Is it relevant to the consumer who is constantly finding and redefining genre and can’t wait for the standards bodies to endorse the name? After all, by the time new vocabulary is defined in the authoritative dictionaries, it already has been widely adopted and used.

So we now have a truly ‘mixed’ economy comprising, physical books sold through physical stores, physical books sold through digital stores and digital books sold through digital stores. Should the same construct serve all three channels, or should the physical model act as a loose base, but we adopt more appropriate and consumer facing methods for the digital world?

Amazon Kindle only allows two ‘dry’ classifications and seven keywords, Kobo is more tolerant and PubIt is only just about to finally go international.

Are genres truly hierarchical or now lateral? Are keywords now more important than the headline genre? Do we find ‘books like’ through sales or more sophisticated means? Do we enable keywords to be excluded as well as included? How do we express multiple demographic appeal? How do we rate relevance? How do we rate or harness genuine reviews? How do we use the content itself to define its appeal? Do new books always come before older ones?

We don’t have the answers, but we do realise that today’s cumbersome expressions are frustratingly restrictive and far from being engaging and in some cases relevant. They provide a base in the digital world, but sadly not much else.

Today, finding a new unknown title in these silos, is like finding a digital needle in a giant digital haystack.

Bleep! The Spending Noise of Today

When we travel on the Tube we present our Oyster card and the fare is automatically calculated and deducted from our pre paid credit and we are given entry, or are able to leave the station. Sometimes you can see the amount deducted, but when there is a queue moving behind you, or when the display is badly light, or merely old, we often blindly trust the fare is correct and move on.

Yesterday's cash registers used to go 'CaaChing' now the machine merely goes Bleep!

Today’s digital market is full of innovative services all aimed at promoting you and your company and brand to the top of the charts. Google ad words, Search Optimisation and many more services are aimed at getting the product in front of the people. Are they the right people and do the hits convert to sales and money is secondary. Being able to relate money in to sales achieved has long been an art form mastered by Marketeers, but today we all are increasingly restricted to hearing ‘Bleep’ and knowing that some money has been taken.

Some time ago there was a study into consumer buying habits that was aimed at establishing whether there was a difference in the spending habits between cash and credit consumers. The research found that those with credit spent around 20% more than those who were just using cash. After all, it is easy to spend when all you hear is Bleep!

So is this new ‘blind trust’ just restricted to online marketing and credit card spending?

As we increasingly all become social network publishers and that includes all business too, what is the cost of visibility? What is the cost of indirect and direct marketing? What is the cost of list management? How do we measure success in a world where there are multiple sale points and subliminal advertising is everywhere?

Perhaps Bleep is all we hear and it’s only after a quick direct debit from our account that we see the cost of doing digital marketing today.

Bleep!

Do Sales Rise as Discoverability Cost Increase?

As the roles across the value chain of the various publishing sectors change we find ourselves asking, how much does it cost to acquire a new customer, to retain them and to do business with them in an environment where prices remain at best unstable and at worst are falling?In the old world costs are fairly well defined, but in the new world these become far more complex and all tend to add small increments to the overall cost of doing business

Who should do what, and spend what to promote what, is an interesting challenge with authors, publishers, retailers all trying to be the communications hub with their consumers? The buzz word today is 'discoverability' and how we can all channel our resources (money and effort) to making it work.

Google, Twitter, Facebook all are about advertising and maximising their opportunity for businesses to pay to be see over the crowd. If you want to be seen at the top of the search then search optimisation is a key and money is the answer. If you want your tweets to resonate then again money is the answer and now Facebook is to join the game which gives you details on how many people have viewed what has been written.

Anything that gets searches, tweets and events and posts ‘seen’ is fair game and with it obviously comes an army of helpers to enable businesses to exploit these facilities at an additional cost. Facebook now plan is to introduce their new post service in the US and has begun tests in New Zealand. The cost is thought to be $7 a post and obviously could raise significant revenues for the social giant.

What is clearly now starting to appear is a whole series of new toll boths and additional cost options to doing business on the internet, or as some would suggest – doing business. Social and Search giants are not alone in creating new additional and compelling charges , the banks, insurance and other financial institutions have done it for years. The questions are now whether the market can sustain the overall costs, who should respond and how and who should channel their resources elsewhere? 

It is after all easy to spend money but often much harder, or increasingly harder, to make it>  

Digital Marketing Is Marketing

Digital publishing is not just about pouring the physical book into a digital container, or even about redesigning the content so it digitally stands on its heads, does a twirl and explodes in a sea of multi media. It is about revisiting everything from its creation and acquisition to its death, which in digital, could mean eternity. One of the latest areas to raise the noise levels within the market, is concerning how to market in the digital age. This is not just about marketing digital works, but all works be they physical, digital or hybrid. Here again the various sectors and genre are diverging often in different directions and at different speeds and what is clear today is that there is not one shoe that will fit all.

Today, the haystack of available works is getting bigger by the day. Not only do we have the book in print, but conceivably every book ever published and every aspiring work now being published directly by anyone wishing to express themselves. How do we find that needle in this haystack? How do we validate it? How do we value it?

Marketing a book in a mass market environment was often down to throwing money at the wall and hoping some sticks. Yes there was often some great marketing promotions and creative materials, but at the end of the day it often came down to that old retail adage, ‘if it ain’t on the shelf, you can’t sell it.’ The internet changed that and created the virtual shelf. Now the problem was not getting it onto the shelf, but making it visible on the shelf, getting it to the top of the pile and ensuring that it was suitably tagged to respond to searches. Customers also wanted to touch , feel and value inside the cover. Customers suddenly became known on the internet and their habits and likes were trackable, making direct marketing and upselling feasible. However, the customers were owned by the retailers and the publishers were somewhat kept at arms length so remained blind and locked into a mass market. Now we have social marketing, which differs from mass and direct as it is viral and can have a life of its own. It allows everyone to be known. 

We now have three marketing tectonic plates colliding each with different drivers, audience focus and potential results today and tomorrow.

The point that readers are often very eclectic can’t be forgotten. Not only do they often read a wide range of material, but they often do so in a inconsistent manner. We often look for different material according the role we are playing at the time or the need we are seeking to satisfy. The teacher will look for, validate and value course material differently from theirown leisure reading – same person, different roles. The student will look for, validate and value the same course material differently – same material, different role and values. These different perspectives of need and value are what makes marketing difficult and the ‘one shoe’ approach often unrewarding to the one person that matters – the buyer.  

The latest buzz word is ‘discoverability’. It as if we believe that correctly tagging and referencing material will make it discoverable and therefore a success. Suddenly, many believe everything will become simpler through technology  As we all discovered, merely piling money into schemes such as  Adwords may have got us to the top of the pile but didn’t guarantee a sale. Getting ‘liked’ in Facebook may give us a recommendation, but actually says little other that it was like for some reason. A Twitter recommendation is limited by its characters and often is like scattering gains into the wind. A lot of the social networking marketing appears to be more about ‘mass recognition’ than mass validation. Perhaps that is the answer, if we can get enough people to say they like it we all believe it has real value?

It would appear that the bottomline is that there is no right or wrong way to market a work. Like all marketing it is about understanding your audience, how to reach that audience, how to ‘connect’ with that audience, how you measure performance and ultimately where the money is today.  The challenge is how do you organise yourself to do this allowing the core to remain whilst experimenting and measuring the different approaches?

Lost in Transition

The ISBN, ISSN, BIC and BISC codes and jacket images have all helped the trade, but do they still matter as much in the digital and direct marketing era?

It’s as if we have all been on a constant never ending journey to improve the contextual information and identification of works. Everyone in publishing today understands the relevance and power of good structured bibliographic information. This helps us search, find, validate and select the right work, but is this still enough in today’s consumer driven market?

Today we use the likes of Google to search, Wikipedia to search deeper, Amazon and ABE to search for books and the likes of email, Facebook and Twitter to communicate. The reality is that they are what many of us use and so are pivotal to any marketing strategy. Does the consumer know or even care about the ISBN and would they know the BIC and BISC category codes?

Today we have to start to think about the user, how they want to find things, how they socialise and how they can validate the relevance of what they find.

The emergence of the jacket image, which really started with the likes of Amazon in the 90s, has now become a de facto standard. Whether we like it or not, users can and will often immediately, ‘judge a book by its cover’. It’s hard to imagine selling physical let alone digital trade books over the internet today without the jacket, but is that enough?

We all dabbled with ‘search inside’, but even Amazon often got this wrong and their ‘surprise me’ page could often turn out to be a ‘reject me’ one. First chapters were not fully exploited as a free teaser and the page selection experience was and remains somewhat inconsistent and haphazard across the market. It is interesting that academic publishers often understood the key pages to sell their books, but others left it to the arbitrary, ‘pick 10% from anywhere’, which could include front matter and even blank pages!

A product description, (blurb) and readers comments and their ratings often now accompany an individual title, but again more as filler than a driver and are often restricted to one site. Some would also suggest that some consumer comments, read like they had been written by a marketing person, an author and not a consumer.

We have seen the author video which often was too long and also tended to play to the converted. We have seen the emergence of other video reviews from retailers and fans but these often languish on YouTube looking for a home. Youtube is as valid a promotion platform as any, but how many use it and what information is tagged?

Google gave us the ultimate search across the content itself but this often was only as good as the term used and the pages rendered. How many jacket images and illustrations are correctly tagged, promoted and linked through the likes of Google images?

So as we move into the ‘enhanced ebook’ world and the content itself can explode into different media, how do we package that contextual wrap such that it is contestant across the market, engages consumers and sells books, be they physical or digital? Esther Dyson once said that the key to the Internet was being able to find that digital needle in the digital haystack. We would suggest that we haven’t found it yet. We may also have to rethink what we do and consider a revolution not a gentle evolution.

Some would suggest we adopt the DOI identifier but they would be as foolish as when it was first muted in the late 90s. Some would suggest that every form of a rendition is given a unique ISBN and that would appear to miss the mark. Some would suggest it more important that we are able to group renditions and present choice than divide them and offer a disjointed picture.

Finally, we are moving from a front list bestseller mass market to one that sells all books, in all forms and has a distinctively long tail. How do we revisit those long forgotten titles and ensure that they too have visibility?

It is important that we recognise that context needs to be uniform and available to all across the market. So what would you see as the contextual information of tomorrow?

Bifurcation

Last week we had two viewpoints expressed in Digital Book World which raised much debate and further amplified the gulf of dialogue and thinking within the industry today over the issue of self publishing especially in the digital world.

First we had the original article ‘Leaked: Hachette Document Explains Why Publishers Are Relevant’ , which again raises the question as to the role of the publisher in tomorrow’s changing value chain. The premise of the proposition was based on, ‘Self-publishing is a misnomer’ and it went on to lay out the value added services that publishers can offer authors. When we look at these in pure digital terms there are a number of questions:

‘Curator’ we are not sure that this is the right term but irrespective is the curator for the author or the consumer?

‘Venture capitalist’ some would suggest that this actually describes the publisher role. As many who have dealt with VCs know, the VC onus is often purely on the money and return, more than the venture and interestingly most VCs have an exit strategy from the outset.

‘Sales and Distribution Specialist ‘ we agree this is very important in the physical world where grabbing shelf space and promotion has to be ‘in the face’ . However, does it carry the same weight in a digital world? The digital world does not just compete with the other new titles and some back list, but has to compete with everybook ever published. There is an opportunity, but it is more about marketing and brand awareness than sales and distribution. It could be questioned what digital sales expertise one needs when the sales are to a small number of aggregators who actually drive the sales and who by their virtual shelves carry everything anyway.

’Brand Builder and Copyright Watchdog’ this is real value and one that becomes of even greater importance the more digital we become. Brand building is critical in today’s viral world, but as often proved, this can be unpredictable in today’s Facebook and YouTube world. Copyright protection is however difficult and the publisher should have the mechanism to monitor, raise take down notices and litigate where needed. However, we must remember that a watchdog is not just about copyright and we live in a digital ‘honesty box’ trade, where it is rumoured that ‘no audit’ clauses exist today, so assuming a huge amount of trust.

We then read the response from self publishing author JA Konrath, ‘Advice to Publishers’ .

In his response Konrath lists six points:

‘Offer much better royalties to authors.’ This should be a given but there is often much debate about the digital norm and the fact that royalties are based on net sales which can be very loose. If agents do not tie contracts to term times, authors may find they are digitally tied to perpetual contracts, with little incentive and where both agents and publishers live off a sizable proportion of earnings for life plus 70 years. In this digital real time age, why digital royalties aren’t paid out monthly or even at the end of each day and totally transparently? The recent Simon and Schuster move on transparency is a step in the right direction but to some is only a one step.

‘Release titles faster. It can take 18 months after a book is turned in to be published. I can do it myself in a week.’ This is a legacy issue and often tied to physical lead times that are required by many large bricks and motor chains. In a digital world this doesn’t apply but the implications on the development process within publishers are significant and with reducing advances the pressure to reduce lead times and be smarter is clear for all to see.

‘Use up-to-date accounting methods that are trackable by the author, and pay royalties monthly.’ We have covered this above and must remember, when someone decides to do this and promote it heavily, it may become a game changer for all.

‘ Lower e-book prices.’ We see Konrath’s point and how some have moved volume by low price pointing. It is a case that when there is only one mouth to feed then a larger amount of a lower price is acceptable, but when there is a corporate to feed, there is often a cost point that must be first cleared to have any chance of break even.

‘ Stop futilely fighting piracy.’ This is not so much about self publishing as about publishing risk. We will soon reach a point when DRM (Digital Rights Management) becomes less of a risk and more of an inhibitor. It happened in music with MP3 and it will happen with books, it is just a case of timing.

‘Start marketing effectively. Ads and catalogue copy aren’t enough. Neither is your imprint’s Twitter feed.’ We understand Konrath’s point, but we all face the same problem and there are no digital marketing silver bullets. If there were, we would all be adopting them and … Publishers do offer scope and skills, but many have not developed these and rely heavily on external resources to show them the way. This is a core skill set for tomorrow’s publisher and one where they can offer in house value add.

Last week a good friend was offered a digital deal on some six titles that are still in print, but where the digital right is not encompassed within the contract. The agent had taken some months to negotiate an offer 25% net and suggested it was a good deal. Our advice was to define a fix term time, understand the reversal clauses on digital, agree the loan and rental deals up front, and the control and pricing policy on agency. The agent gulped and understandably is yet to respond.

Rethinking the Digital Future

Technology is not only changing how we do business and is introducing a significant challenge in reducing the time to do business. As technology speeds up processes it also highlights those age old time blockages and inefficiencies that didn’t matter, or could not be addressed yesterday. Technology now enables us need to look afresh at the end to end business and consider how we can do things quicker and smarter.

Today when we look at publishing, we often see a market littered with ‘gatekeeper’ checkpoints. These barriers were not only aimed at introducing quality control, reducing the flow of traffic and they also often to slowed down the process itself.

Manuscript submissions, acquisitions, development and production can take months if not years. There may appear to be perfectly good reasons why it should be as slow as it is, but it is now clearly restrained by people rather than technology. The way works are also marketed, promoted and sold, could be said by some to belong to a bygone age that was more obsessed with feeding the shelf, events and calendars and those 13 week windows, than satisfying today’s real time world of instant gratification.

However, like many markets, we are obsessed with the consumer end. After all, the consumer is the only one that puts money is and despite what some marketers think, is the only one who decides the true winners. When we look at the end to end process we often view it as not one marketplace but a series of linked marketplaces each with their own gatekeepers, fiefdoms and find that they are often overly protected from each other. Despite the huge advances and improvements to Supply Chain communications, some what suggest that we still do business by ‘slipping notes to each other under the door’.

What if we could tear up today’s processes and redefine the role of the gatekeepers?

What if we could view the business as one end to end marketplace?

What if Michael Porter’s linear Value Chain model was a virtuous circle with no start and end?

What if we viewed the business as one integrated marketplace with content and associated rights at its core and the players and activities being just that and periphery to that core. More importantly, what if we recognised that all players could effectively participate at any time?

Imagine consumers being able to access and comment on manuscripts alongside agents, publishers and retailers, some will say its already happening. Imagine living bibliographic records being managed as ’wiki’ records where they are developed not so much in a vacuum but as crowdsourced documents that never stop being updated, appended to and refined. Imagine the elusive rights registry being open to all.

An inclusive ‘book’ marketplace perspective could change not only how we do business, the speed in which we do business but the relationships within the business? It could remove some of the adversarial and holier than thou attitudes that continue to dog the industry. It could create a new level of interest and participation that is more organic and spontaneous than today’s often ‘manufactured’ approach.

This holistic marketplace may appear unfamiliar, dangerous, exciting and to some a bridge too far, but it is the direction that technology, social networking and networks are clearly taking us today. We don’t fully understand the implications on today’s roles, processes and business and the route is somewhat dynamic and unpredictable but it is happening and the genie is not going back in the bottle.

The key is to see one holistic marketplace.

When we look at the likes of Amazon, Kobo and others we see businesses uncluttered with yesterday’s thinking and ready to redefine how we do business tomorrow not just at the consumer end but within the new virtuous circle of value.

Google To Take You Inside The Shop

We all thought that Google Street was taking mapping to a new level when you could actually ‘walk’ down the street and see the sights as if you were actually there, but Google has now taken the experience to a new level and has started a pilot project which will take you behind the shop door!

The new project is completely on a voluntary and Google’s Street View has already gone behind the doors of some 17 museums.

Initially the project is being limited to locations including London, Paris and some cities in Japan, Australia, New Zealand and the US. It is based on inviting the most searched types of businesses to be captured from the inside on camera. This group includes restaurants, hotels, shops, gyms and repair workshops, but interestingly today it excludes big-brand chains and community services such as Hospitals and solicitors.

In addition to the 360-degree fish eye and wide-angle lens shots the businesses that participate are also invited to upload their own pictures. All images will become Google’s property that may be used in other Google applications.

So if you own a bookshop would you participate or watch your competitors get that extra lift? Will Google make it a no brainer for those bookshops that sign up for Google? Will they exclude bookchains and enable the little independent to be exposed?

The interesting challenge is whether business see this as an intrusion, a marketing tool, or merely something they must now do in order to compete?

What is the Value of Your Direct Customer List?

Everyone in direct marketing be it mail order, ecommerce or just mailing knows the value of their list. This comprises all their customers and details when the joined, how they joined, what they have received and importantly how much they have bought and what and when they bought it. Sometimes the list itself is rented out via brokers and sometimes it is retained and reciprocal mailing is done instead.

The one given is that lists are not cheap to acquire, need constant management and pruning and a name doesn’t guarantee anything but the ability to communicate. In fact acquiring names through brokers and purchase is often fraught with disappointment as the conversion rate is nearly always single figures and the earn-out is only achieved on repeat business. It isn’t often about the size of the list but the concurrency, accuracy of the list and ability to mine it.

So we stood back with some amazement when the news broke that Barnes and Noble where buying Borders customer list and information for a staggering $13.9 million. The data is reportedly on 48 million customers but goes back years and in fact has hit a snag because the bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn has questioned whether Border’s policy covers pre 2008 customers and whether customers must give their consent before the sale can close.

While Borders' current privacy policy, which was implemented in May 2008, clears the sale of customer information, questions remain as to whether customers who joined Borders' database before May 2008 are subject to the policy and whether they must consent to a sale.

The point we would question is the value of the list of 48 million customers, the envisaged conversion rate expected and the cost of acquiring the converted names. This is brought further into question by the fact that Barnes and Noble have already diluted the list and have said that they believe that 31% of the customers are already Barnes and Noble customers. So they are buying 36 million customers.We presume that the list is been de-duped and de-seeded.

We are not privy to the detail of which customers are listed and the mix of these but obviously the two businesses did not have exactly the same profile. We presume the list include the ebook business detail which was run by Kobo but does Kobo have that detail separately as they dispatched the goods? What is proportion of gamers, video customers to book buyers? What is proportion of post only detail and what is the size of the email kist? How many are ‘live’ and have bought in the last 18 months and how has the accuracy of the list been maintained during the last 18 months whilst Borders has fought for its life?

Acquiring a list of 48 million, sorry 36 million, is fine, but delivering a return is another. Just mailing this number is a challenge in itself if they are to avoid merely being viewed as spammers and being automatically rejected at the first hurdle. Some would suggest that it would be wiser to acquire live companies with live lists or simply buying into electoral lists and directories.

Who's Brand Is It Anyway?

So you think you own a brand and can control it in a global economy? Surely no one can pretend to be Pepsi, Wal-Mart, Apple, etc.?

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) will soon start to accept internet domain names in non-Roman scripts. The domain name is that element in web address that precedes the “dot” and often is the brand. These new internationalised domain names will not open up the internet to users whose native language does not use the Roman alphabet, but it will also open up the opportunity for many to pretend to be something they aren’t. So not only do you need to watch the obvious but you may now need to learn what the translation of your brand name is in ;Korean, Arabic, Chinese, Korean and Japanese scripts.

To a non Roman-reading eye, may find an e-mail link could lead to a clone site constructed by thieves. “Phishing”, may never be easier and what may have been difficult in Roman text is about to get a lot more difficult especially given some of the new scripts are based on images.